Monthly Archives: April 2015

Zaxaa is building a good reputation as a shopping cart platform. And if you’re selling your own e-books directly from your website rather than through a link to Amazon or your publisher, it might be worth checking out. Its instant automation service is free though you do pay a small percentage on sales.

Followers claim it is one of the easiest to use sales platforms. And better still, unlike many other free services i’ve been checking out, it does not email your customers. Your email list is your own.

If you’re into affiliate marketing, it helps you recruit affiliates to help sell your products and to find products you can sell as an affiliate.

Warning re changes in VAT

EU Vat changes are creating headaches across the board for any small business trying to sell e-books, tutorials, courses, directly in the European marketplace.

I’m not sure how well publicized this has been. I only found out completely by accident through a writer in France who stopped selling her writing courses online because of the new laws.

As I understand it, if we sell to anywhere in Europe, we must charge the VAT applied by the country in which our buyer lives–a headache as each of the many countries has its own VAT rules and percentage charges.

For this reason, more beleaguered small businesses are selling through sales platforms which then make it easier to calculate the tax due or even take responsibility for deducting and paying the tax to the proper authorities.

Written by an Internet Marketer, this article published on the website Gain Higher Ground at the beginning of the year is one of the best and clearest I found to explain the problem.

By English: Louis John Rhead (1857–1926) [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsThey were uncouth with nasty habits, according to Gulliver. He considered them primitive and obsessed with “pretty stones” they found by digging in mud,. They stood for the love for material things so frowned on by Swift. Nowadays in the dictionary a yahoo is defined as a crude, brutish or ignorant person.

As eighties’ student slang, the word was used to refer to unsophisticated country bumpkins and this is said to have appealed to Yahoo! co-founders, David Filo and Jerry Yang.

The official version is that it is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,”

Yahoo! groups are an invaluable resource for authors. You can find groups which are passionate about your niche and if you join in forum discussions you may even win some devoted fans.

You can find groups through which you can do your research, promote your work whether it be fiction or non-fiction.

Of course you can also find yourself wasting a lot of good writing time by following the highways and byways of discussions that are of no relevance at all to your work in hand 🙂

Ever since schooldays, snippets of the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem have danced around in my head and heart. Don’t get me wrong. I always disliked it.

It prompted great classroom hilarity at the expense of a quiet boy named Alf. ” Where Alph, the sacred river, ran,” we all chanted with enthusiasm looking at him meaningfully. It probably put him off poetry for life.

And a line like “As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,” is tailor-made to prompt jeers and cheers from a rowdy classroom. What was the man thinking of? To be fair, the word was only entering popular parlance toward the end of the poet’s life. But as an educated man, he must have been aware of it from the beginning of the 19th century.

Despite the wild opium-fuelled imagery of the poem, Xanadu is a real place, the summer palace created by Kublai Khan, grandson of the legendary warrior Genghis Khan.

And despite the odd vibrant image, I still dislike the poem. But it did prompt Coleridge’s story of The Man from Porlock–an unexpected visitor who interrupted his writing. His excuse for not finishing the poem.

For by the time the man from Porlock left, Coleridge had lost all impetus and forgotten how he had intended the poem to end.

We all have these interruptions to our writing life. I like to think I’d jot down a few fast and furious notes before rising to deal with the person or problem. What’s your technique for dealing with interruptions to your writing life?

If you’d like a quick recap of the poem, find it here– Kubla Khan. It is a great reminder of the importance of setting to your or any story. It is also a great reminder to read your work aloud and check for anything that could be misconstrued.

New: Affiliate links

Any products I recommend I have bought. But in some cases, I may have received a review copy. Those which have affiliate links may compensate me if you make a purchase.
Neither of those situations lead to you paying extra for a product purchase, or to me giving a
favorable review or recommendation of a product that I think is not up to standard.

Life lessons in editing, writing, and marketing

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